The Wibelungen

by Richard Wagner

  The "Ghibeline" Kaiserdom and Friedrich I.

  Now it is highly noteworthy that the stress toward Ideal vindication of their claims becomes more pronounced in the Wibelingen or Wibelungen (to name them with the historic folk-mouth) in measure as their blood departs from immediate kinship with the ur-old ruling race. If in Karl the Great the drift of blood was still at height of its ancestral strength, in the Hohenstaufian Friedrich I. we see almost nothing but the ideal stress: it had become at last the very soul of the Imperial entity, that could find less and less legitimation in its blood and real estate, and therefore sought it in the Idea.

  Under the last two Kaisers of the Frankish ducal race of the Salier the great fight with the Church had begun in deadly earnest. Heinrich V., previously supported by the Church against his hapless father, had scarcely reached the rank of Kaiser than he felt the fateful craving to renew his father's wrestle with the Church, and, as if the only means of combating her claims, to extend his title over her as well: he must have divined that the Kaiser were impossible, should his world-dominion not include dominion of the Church herself. It is characteristic, on the other hand, that the interim non-Wibelingian Kaiser Lothar adopted an attitude of peaceful submission to the Church: he did not fathom what the Kaiser-rank implied; his claims did not extend to world-dominion,-those were the heirloom of the Wibelingen, the old-legitimist contenders for the Hoard. But clearly and plainly as none before, great Friedrich I. took up the heir-idea in its sublimest sense. The whole inner and outer depravation of the world appeared to him the necessary consequence of the weakness and incompleteness with which the Kaiser's power had been exerted thitherto: the material might, already in sorry case, must be perfectly amended by the Kaiser's ideal dignity; and that could only come to pass when its extreme pretensions were enforced. The ideal lines of the great fabric that rose before Friedrich's energetic soul may be drawn (in the freer mode of speech allowed to-day) somewhat as follows:-

  "In the German Folk survives the oldest lawful race of Kings in all the world: it issues from a son of God, called by his nearest kinsmen Siegfried, but Christ by the remaining nations of the earth; for the welfare of his race, and the peoples of the earth derived therefrom, he wrought a deed most glorious, and for that deed's sake suffered death. The nearest heirs of his great deed, and of the power won thereby, are the 'Nibelungen,' to whom the earth belongs in name and for the happiness of every nation. The Germans are the oldest nation, their blue-blood King is a 'Nibelung,' and at their head he claims world-rulership. There can therefore exist no right to any sort of possession or enjoyment, in all this world, that does not emanate from him and need its hallowing by his feoffment or sanction: all property or usufruct not bestowed or sanctioned by the Kaiser is lawless in itself, and counts as robbery; for the Kaiser enfiefs and sanctions for the good, possession or enjoyment, of all, whereas the unit's self-seized gain is a theft from all.-In the German Folk the Kaiser grants these feoffments or confirmations himself; for all other nations their Kings and Princes are attorneys of the Kaiser, from whom all earthly sovereignty originally flows, as the planets and their moons receive their radiance from the sun.-Thus too the Kaiser delegates the high-priestly power, originally no less pertaining to him than the earthly might, to the Pope of Rome: the latter has to exercise the Sight-of-God in his name, and to acquaint him with the God's-decree, that he may execute the Heavenly Will in name of God upon the earth. The Pope accordingly is the Kaiser's most important officer, and the weightier his office, the more does it behove the Kaiser to keep strict watch that the Pope exerts it in the meaning of the Kaiser, i.e. for the peace and healing of all nations upon earth."-

  No lower must we reckon Friedrich's estimate of his rank supreme, his right divine, if we are properly to judge the motives brought to clearest daylight in his actions.

  We see him in the first place making firm the base of his material might by composing the territorial strife in Germany through reconcilement with his relatives the Welfen, and compelling the princes of bordering peoples, in particular the Danes, Poles and Hungarians, to accept their lands in fee from him. Thus fortified he fared to Italy, and, as arbiter over the Lombards in the Roncalian Diet, for the first time published to the world a systematic digest of the Kaiser's claims; in which, for all the influence of Imperial Roman principles, we recognise the strictest consequences of the aforesaid view of his authority: his Imperial Right was here extended even to the grant of air and water.

  No less determined were his claims against and over the Church herself, after an initial period of reserve. A disputed Papal election gave him the opportunity of exerting his supreme right: with strict observance of what he deemed fit priestly forms, he had the election scrutinised, deposed the Pope who seemed to him at fault, and installed the vindicated rival in his place.

  Every trait of Friedrich's, every undertaking, each decree, bears most indisputable witness to the energetic congruence with which he ever strove to realise his high ideal. The unwavering firmness with which he opposed the no less obstinate Pope Alexander III., the almost superhuman rigour-in a Kaiser by no means prone to cruelty by nature-with which he doomed to overthrow the equally undaunted Milan, are incorporate moments of the grand Idea informing him.

  Two mighty foes, however, stood up against the heaven-storming World-king; the first at starting-point of his material power, in the German landed system,-the second at the terminus of his ideal endeavour, the Catholic Church established in the conscience of Romanic peoples in particular. Both foes joined forces with a third, on which the Kaiser, in a sense, himself had first bestowed its consciousness: the instinct of freedom in the Lombard communes.

  If the earliest resistance of the German stems had had its origin in the thirst for freedom from their Frankish rulers, that bent had gradually passed over from the shattered tribal fellowships to the lords who snatched these fragments to themselves: although the effort of these princes had all the evil attributes of selfish lust-of-mastery, yet their longing for its independent satisfaction might rank in their eyes as a fight for freedom, however less exalted it must seem in ours. The bent-to-freedom of the Church was more ideal by far, more universal: in Christian terminology it might count as struggle of the soul for liberation from the fetters of the sensual world, and undoubtedly it passed for such in the minds of her greatest chiefs; she had been forced to share too deeply in the world's material taste of might, however, and her ultimate victory could therefore be gained through nothing but the ruin of her inmost soul.

  But the spirit of freedom shews out the purest in the Lombard townships, and precisely (alas! almost solely) in their decisive fights with Friedrich. These fights are insofar the most remarkable event of a critical historic period, as in them, for the first time in the history of the world, the spirit of ur-human freedom embodied in the Burgher-commune girds up itself to a fight for life and death with an old established, all-embracing sovereignty. Athens' fight against the Persians was patriotic opposition to a huge monarchic piracy: all similar famous deeds of single townships, until the time of the Lombardians, bear the selfsame character of defence of ancient racial independence against a foreign conqueror. Now, this ancestral freedom, that cleaves to the root of a nationality till then untroubled, was in nowise present with the Lombard communes: history has seen the population of these cities, compounded of all nations and bare of any old tradition, fall shameful victim to the greed of every conqueror; through a thousand years of total impotence, in these cities lived no nation, i.e. no race with any consciousness of its earliest origin : in them dwelt merely men, men led by the need of mutual insurance of an undisturbed prosperity to an ever plainer evolution of the principle of Society, and its realisement through the Commune (Gemeinde).

  This novel principle, devoid of racial lore or chronicle arising purely of and for itself; owes its historic origin to the population of the Lombard cities, who, imperfectly as they could understand and turn it to a lasting good, yet evolved themselves th
ereby from deepest feebleness to agents of the highest force;-and if its entry into history is to count as the spark that leaps from the stone, then Friedrich is the steel that struck it from the stone.

  Friedrich, the representative of the last racial Ur-Folk-Kinghood, in mightiest fulfilment of his indeviable destiny, struck from the stone of manhood the spark before whose splendour he himself must pale. The Pope launched his ban, the Welf Heinrich forsook his king in his direst want,-but the sword of the Lombard band of brothers smote the imperial warrior with the terrible rout at Lignano.

  Ascent of the Ideal content of the Hoard into the "Holy Grail."

  The World-ruler recognised from whence his deepest wound had come, and who it was that cried his world-plan final halt. It was the spirit of free Manhood loosed from the nature-soil of race, that had faced him in this Lombard Bond. He made short work of both the older foes: to the High-priest he gave his hand,-he fell with crushing force upon the selfish Guelphs; and so, once more arrived at summit of his power and undisputed might,-he spake the Lombards free, and struck with them a lasting peace.

  At Mainz he gathered his whole Reich around him; all his feudatories, from the first to the last, he fain would greet once more: the clergy and the laity surrounded him; from every land Kings sent ambassadors with precious gifts, in homage to his Kaiser-might. But Palestine sent forth to him the cry to save the Holy Tomb.-To the land of morning Friedrich turned his gaze: a force resistless drew him on toward Asia, to the cradle of the nations, to the place where God begat the father of all Men. Wondrous legends had he heard of a lordly country deep in Asia, in farthest India,-of an ur-divine Priest-King who governed there a pure and happy people, immortal through the nurture of a wonder-working relic called "the Holy Grail."-Might he there regain the lost Sight-of-God, now garbled by ambitious priests in Rome according to their pleasure?-

  The old hero girt him up; with splendid retinue of war he marched through Greece: he might have conquered it,-what booted that?-unresting he was drawn to farthest Asia. There on tempestuous field he broke the power of the Saracens; unchallenged lay the promised land before him; he could not wait for the construction of a flying bridge, but urged impatient Eastwards,-on horse he plunged into the stream: none saw him in this life again.

  Since then, the legend went that once the Keeper of the Grail had really brought the holy relic to the Occident; great wonders had he here performed: in the Netherlands, the Nibelungen's ancient seat, a Knight of the Grail had appeared, but vanished when asked forbidden tidings of his origin;-then was the Grail conducted back by its old guardian to the distant morning-land;-in a castle on a lofty mount in India it now was kept once more.

  In truth the legend of the Holy Grail, significantly enough, makes its entry on the world at the very time when the Kaiserhood attained its more ideal direction, and the Nibelung's Hoard accordingly was losing more and more in material worth, to yield to a higher spiritual content. The spiritual ascension of the Hoard into the Grail was accomplished in the German conscience, and the Grail, at least in the meaning lent it by German poets, must rank as the Ideal representative or follower of the Nibelungen-Hoard; it, too, had sprung from Asia, from the ur-home of mankind; God had guided it to men as paragon of holiness.

  It is of the first importance that its Keeper was priest and king alike, that is, a Master (Oberhaupt) of all Spiritual Knighthood, such as was introduced from the Orient in the twelfth century. So this Master was in truth none other than the Kaiser, from whom all Chivalry proceeded; and thus the real and ideal world-supremacy, the union of the highest kinghood and priesthood, seemed completely attained in the Kaiser.

  The quest of the Grail henceforth replaces the struggle for the Nibelungen-Hoard, and as the occidental world, unsatisfied within, reached out past Rome and Pope to find its place of healing in the tomb of the Redeemer at Jerusalem,-as, unsatisfied even there, it cast its yearning gaze, half spiritual half physical, still farther toward the East to find the primal shrine of manhood,-so the Grail was said to have withdrawn from out the ribald West to the pure, chaste, reachless birth-land of all nations.-

  To pass the ur-old Nibelungen-saga in review, we see it springing like a spiritual germ from an oldest race's earliest glance at Nature (Naturanschauung); we see this germ develop to a mighty plant on ever more material soil, especially in the Historic evolution of the saga, so that in Karl the Great it seems to thrust its knotty fibres deep into the actual earth; till finally in the Wibelingian Kaiserdom of Friedrich I. we see this plant unfold its fairest flower to the light: with him the flower faded; in his grandson Friedrich II., the highest mind of all the Kaisers, the wondrous perfume of the dying bloom spread like a lovely fairy-spell through all the world of West and East; till with the grandson of the last-named Kaiser, the youthful Konrad, the leafless withered stem was torn with all its roots and fibres from the ground, and stamped to dust.

  Historic residue of the Material content of the Hoard, in "Real Property."

  A shriek of horror rang through every country when the head of Konrad fell in Naples to the blows of that Charles d'Anjou who in every lineament presents the perfect archetype of all post-Wibelingian Kinghood. He sprang from the oldest of the newer royal races: in France the Capets had long succeeded to the last French Carlovingian. Hugo Capet's origin was well beknown; everybody knew what his race had been before, and how he arrived at the throne: cunning, policy, and violence at a pinch, were the tools of him and his successors, compounding for the right they lacked in 'the people's eyes. These Capets, mn all their later branches, were the pattern for the modern King- and Prince-hood: in no belief in ur-racial descent could it seek foundation for its claims; of every prince the world, coeval and posterior, knew by what mere grant, at what purchase-price, or through what deed of violence, he had attained to power, and by what art or means he must contrive to keep it.

  With the foundering of the Wibelungen, mankind had been torn from the last fibre whereby it still hung, in a sense, to its racial-natural origin. The Hoard of the Nibelungen had evaporated to the realm of Poetry and the Idea; merely an earthly precipitate remained as its dregs: real property.

  In the Nibelungen-myth we found expressed by all the generations who devised, developed and enacted it, an uncommonly clear idea of the nature of property, of ownership. If in the oldest religious view the Hoard appeared to be the splendour of the Earth laid bare to all by day light, we later see it take more compact form as the hero's might-conferring booty, won as guerdon of the bravest, most astounding deed from a vanquished odious adversary. This Hoard, this talisman of might, 'tis true, is henceforth claimed as with hereditary right by the descendants of that godlike hero; yet it has this foremost characteristic, that it is never gained afresh in lazy peace, by simple contract, but only through a deed akin to that of its first winner. Moreover, this constantly-repeated deed of heritage has all the moral meaning of vendetta, of retribution for the murder of a kinsman: so we see blood, passion, love, hate, in short-both physically and spiritually-purely-human springs and motives at work in the winning of the Hoard; man restless and suffering, man doomed to conscious death by his own deed, his victory, and most by his possession, at the head of all ideas of the root-relation of acquirement.-These views, which honoured Man as focus of all power, entirely corresponded with the mode of treating property in actual life. If in earliest antiquity there certainly prevailed the simplest and most natural principle of all, namely that the measure of possession or enjoyment must be meted by man's Need, among conquering nations with excess of goods the strength and prowess of the best-famed fighters became as naturally the measure-giving Subject to the Object of more enjoyable and richer spoils. In the historic Feudal system, so long as it retained its pristine purity, we see this heroic-human principle still plainly voiced: the grant of a fief was merely to this one particular human being who had earned the right to claim reward for some decisive deed, some weighty service. From the moment when a fief became hereditary, the man, his p
ersonal excellence, his acts and deeds, lost value,-which passed over to his property: hereditary possession, no longer personal virtue, now gave their standing to his heirs, and the resulting deeper and deeper depreciation of Man, against the higher and higher appreciation of Property, at last took body in the most contra-human institutions, such as those of Primogeniture; from which, in strange perversity, the later Noble drew all conceit and arrogance, without reflecting that by deriving his worth from a stiffened family-possession he was openly disowning any actual human nobleness .

  So-after the fall of the heroic-human Wibelungen-this hereditary ownership, then property in general, de facto possession, became the title for all rights existing or to be acquired; and Property gave Man that right which man had theretofore conveyed to property. It was this dreg of the vanished Nibelungen-Hoard, then, that the sobered German lords had kept them: though the Kaiser might soar to the highest peak of the Idea, what clung there to the ground below, the Duchies, Palatinates, Marks and Counties, all ranks and offices enfeoffed by the Kaiser, in the hands of his utterly un-idealistic vassals condensed to mere possession, property. Possession now was consequently Right, and upright was it kept by all Established and Approved being henceforth drawn from that one right on a more and more elaborate system. He who had a share in property, or managed to acquire one, from that instant ranked as a natural pillar of the State (der öffentlichen Macht). But this also must be hallowed: what the most glorious Kaisers had claimed in good faith as their ideal title to rule the world, these practical gentry now applied to their possessions; the old divine ur-right was arrogated to himself by every former crown-official; the God's-decree was expounded by Justinian's Roman Rights, and, to the bewilderment of property-enslaved mankind, transcribed in Latin law-books. Kaisers were still appointed, though directly after the downfall of the Wibelungen their rank had already been hawked to the highest bidder; no sooner were they chosen, than to work they set to "acquire" a goodly family-seat "by grace of God," as one henceforth styled the forcible appropriation or nibbling-off of districts. Grown wiser, one gladly left the World-dominion to dear God, who behaved by far more leniently and humanely to the actually-reigning most selfish and depraved vulgarity of the Sons of the Holy Roman Empire than erewhile the old heathen Nibelung warriors, who for any act of meanness made no bones of packing off a man from court and holding.-